5 Ways International Team Can Win Presidents Cup (or How U.S. Can Lose it)

Are you a glass half-full kind of person or a glass half-empty type? Do you usually notice silver linings or only the dark clouds?

Your answers to these questions should offer a personalized, custom headline for the piece you’re about to read.

It’s either this: How the International Team Can Win the Presidents Cup. Or this: How the U.S. Team Can Lose the Presidents Cup.

One thing is for sure: It’s going to take some combination of the two — the International side playing its best and the U.S. team massively underperforming — to create the first unique result in 28 years of this competition.

Here are five ways it could happen.

1. The International’s best players need to play like it…

Depending on where your Google search decides to land, the late football coach Bum Phillips said this about either Don Shula or Bear Bryant – or maybe both of ‘em: “He can take his’n and beat your’n and take your’n and beat his’n.”

This week marks Geoff Ogilvy’s first voyage into Presidents Cup captaincy, but it comes as no secret that he’ll need to get the best out of his best players in order to find success. That means Si Woo Kim needs to play like Scottie Scheffler, the guy he never beats in their money games at home. It means Hideki Matsuyama and Adam Scott might need to team together as they’ve done in the past and “out-veteran” the likes of Xander Schauffele and Patrick Cantlay. It means Ryan Fox needs to show Wyndham Clark who the better major champion of 2026 really is.

Even if you believe players such as Ryo Hisatsune and Christiaan Bezuidenhout can each be an asset for the International team, it’s hard to think the squad will stand on their shoulders this week. It’ll need to be the team’s top talents – each likely playing all five sessions – who carry this team if indeed it’s going to have a chance to win.

2. … while the best players for the U.S. don’t.

You’ll hear these numbers a lot this week: In two previous Presidents Cup appearances, Scheffler owns just a 3-5-1 record and when combined with his Ryder Cup mark, he’s an ugly 6-11-4 overall.

As we should all realize by now, much like they say in the stock market, past performance is not a predictor of future results. I wouldn’t predict an underwhelming week for Scottie simply because he’s underwhelmed previously. If anything, he should’ve gained enough experience in team events over the past half-decade that it stands to reason he could start playing like the same Scheffler who owns a massive floor in individual events.

If he goes 5-0-0 this week, it’s over. The other 11 players would only need to combine for 10.5 points in order to retain the title.

If there’s a path to victory for the Internationals, though, they’ll need to slay the dragon. It’s difficult to compare this competition to the prison yard, but the old tales of punching the biggest guy in the face to assert your authority might very well serve as a figurative analogy for Ogilvy’s side.

3. Figuring out the green speeds is a monumental advantage.

At last year’s Ryder Cup, even though the U.S. was the home team, slower greens at Bethpage Black befuddled the players and played right into the hands of the Europeans, who figured ‘em out early. At the recent Solheim Cup, U.S. captain Angela Stanford explained afterward that the slow speeds of Bernardus Golf were a difficult adjustment for her players.

In what is usually such an individual pursuit, it’s strange that one entire team would quickly adjust to a course’s green speeds while the other would fail to accommodate.

Whether it’s an explanation or an excuse, this has become a recurring theme in team events over the past few years, though one which seems readily rectifiable.

If I’m Ogilvy, who’s a course architecture maven already, I’m going to be paying a lot of attention to the green speeds and how they adapt each day – even on an hour-by-hour basis. I might even assign one of the assistants to be the “greens guy” and continually gather as much information as possible throughout the week.

Of course, this is a two-way street. If I’m U.S. captain Brandt Snedeker, I’d do the exact same thing. Just because your team comes into the week with an edge doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look for more of them.

4. Win one of the two team formats.

Two years ago, the U.S. raced out to a 5-0 lead after the opening day’s fourball session, which led to many observers wondering whether the victory might be clinched before Sunday. That is, until the next day, when the Internationals flipped things, taking all five points in Friday’s foursomes session.

That small sample size might be enough to have American fans bemoaning the team’s lack of camaraderie in the alternate-shot format, which often correlates to the Ryder Cup, but there’s really not much of a difference.

Over the past four editions of the Presidents Cup, the U.S. side owns a 23-13 record in fourball matches and 21.5-14.5 in foursomes. That’s fairly dominant, but it’s not dominant in one specific format.

It’s difficult to think the International team can be on the winning side of both team formats, but it’s even more difficult to believe they can be on the losing side of each and still have some semblance of a prayer coming into Sunday’s singles session. Frankly, even though the numbers are close in recent years, the foursomes format is where Ogilvy and his players can poke a few holes in the American ship.

It’s not exactly high-level analytics, but anything close to a level score entering the final day at least gives the Internationals some hope, though even this scenario seems bleak: In those same most recent four editions of this event, the U.S. holds a 26.5-21.5 advantage in singles matches, including a higher Sunday point total in each of the last three.

5. The Ghost of J.J. Spaun.

For more than a year, Ben Griffin was inside the top-six on the U.S. points list, assured of an automatic spot on the roster… until the final week of qualifying, when he dropped out of that range and subsequently wasn’t picked.

The story of Spaun’s failure to be included is one of greater intrigue.

Prior to the Tour Championship, last year’s U.S. Open champion seemed assured of a place on this team. In fact, I said on PGA Tour Radio that he wouldn’t just need one thing to not go his way, but multiple things to go wrong.

Well, that imperfect storm is exactly what happened.

Spaun withdrew due to a shoulder injury after hitting his tee shot on the sixth hole of the opening round. Jacob Bridgeman wound up finishing T-4. (It can be argued that perhaps Jackson Koivun received the “last” captain’s pick, but I’d contend that the fact he didn’t even play over the season’s final two playoff events meant he was probably going to be included no matter what.) Fast forward to the present and both Spaun and Bridgeman are fresh off victories on the DP World Tour and PGA Tour, respectively.

Following his BMW PGA Championship win, Spaun still seemed more than a bit perturbed about his exclusion, hinting that Snedeker never inquired about his injury and revealing that he received a 45-second phone call during which the captain explained that he was “the odd man out.”

While Ryder Cup captain Jim Furyk, who is also serving as an assistant this week, undoubtedly loves the fact that Spaun went into enemy territory and essentially defeated the entire European team, there’s a chance Snedeker’s decision could linger this week. If Bridgeman or Koivun – or Cantlay or Justin Thomas for that matter, each of whom might not have gotten the public vote to make this roster – fails to play well, that specter of an in-form Spaun sitting on his couch during these proceedings could be one which turns into a net-negative for the U.S. side.